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IN MAY 2006 the newspaper La Tercera asked writers and critics to select the most notable Chilean books of the last quarter century. Roberto Bolano's 1998 novel, Los detectives salvajes, garnered the most votes for first place, with José Donoso's El jardin de al lado (1981) a distant second. In her enthusiastic review of Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth (2006), the first selection of Bolaño's stories to be published in English, Franchie Prose sees in them the brilliance she found in the seamless blending of "surrealism, lyricism, wit, invention and political and psychological analysis" of his novels (New York Times Book Revieie, July 9, 2006). The abundance of accolades marshaled for Bolano (1953-2003), now that his fiction appears in French, English, and other major languages, only hints to his true importance to world literature. As hyperbolic as that may sound ("Joycean" in technique and "Kafkaesque" in theme are used to describe his prose; Prose compares him to Isaak Babel), after the won der years of the 19605 and early 1970$, Latin American fiction is still seeking masters comparable to Borges, Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez, Cortázar, and Fuentes. The potential disciples, loosely identified in anthologies like McOndo (1996) and Línens aéreas (1949), are finding a new patriarch in Bolaño, although his work, ironically, is not included in those collections. If 1996 was the annus mirabilis for the new narrative, fewer than five constituents of those self-anointed groups have had any subsequent or lasting impact on Latin American letters at large.
That year, however, Bolano had published the subtle political allegory Estrelln distante (Eng. Distant Star, 2004), the second of his short novels available in English, and La Literatnra nazi en America. The latter, presented as a "novel," is a hilariously allusive set of apocryphal book reviews written in the manner of such masters as Stanis aw Lem (Doskonn a pró nia, 1971; Eng. A Perfect Vacuum, 1979, 1999), Jorge Luis Borges (in tandem with Adolfo Bioy Casares), and Augusto Monterroso. In 1998 Bolano published Los detectives salvajes, his masterpiece and by far the best Latin American contribution to the twentieth-century Western total and essayistic novel. This prose changed forever the notion of mastery among the continent's writers. Bolafio dissuaded his contemporaries, in various politically incorrect pronouncements,...